In the observation of living and movable subjects, artifacts occur in image production because the subjects move. This on the one hand results in unsharpness (motion generates artifacts similar to those of defocusing), and on the other hand, in confocal microscopy the images exhibit poor quality (signal-to-noise ratio) because methods such as image averaging cannot be applied to a pixel when motion is present. With averaging, for example, motion would cause subject pixels to be mixed with non-subject pixels.